


The Alarm Clock

by Ysavvryl



Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: Ancient Technology, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26423830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ysavvryl/pseuds/Ysavvryl
Summary: An Engineer discusses ancient machines and magic with a Wizard and a Priest.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 5
Collections: Press Start VI





	The Alarm Clock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atramento](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atramento/gifts).



Once his tasks in setting up camp were done, Mustadio sought out one of the others in Ramza’s troop. He’d overheard something promising, but had gotten distracted by Radd asking about something else. Hopefully she hadn’t gotten rid of the thing. “Tabitha! I’ve got a question for you.”

Tabitha was currently working as a Wizard, but she had her hat off to speak with some of the other women in the troop. “Yes, what is it?” she asked.

“I heard you got into an argument with a shopkeeper over a small crystal,” he asked. “Do you still have it? I might be able to use it.”

Digging into a hidden pocket of her black robe, she nodded. “Of course; the shopkeeper wanted a ridiculously low price on it.”

Elmira had the hood of her white cloak down; she rolled her eyes. “Seriously. We got it off a Mindflayer. Not just anybody can take out dangerous monsters like that.”

“And it might be a time crystal?” Mustadio asked.

“I’m pretty sure it is,” Tabitha said, handing over a crystal the size of a tiny bead. “It feels like time magic, at least.”

“I can check it,” he said, taking out a pocketwatch. The cover flipped up to reveal the watch; the watch flipped up to reveal the inner workings. It was an unusual design, but he loved it. Within the gears, there was a tiny flickering crystal. Mustadio set the Mindflayer’s crystal by the watch’s crystal. The two crystals started shining in unison. “Alright, it’ll work!”

Tabitha had gotten up to peek at his watch herself. “Hmm, clocks run with these kinds of crystals?”

Mustadio nodded, watching the crystals as he spoke. “Yes, at least the really accurate clocks do. These kinds of crystals have a consistent pulse of magic that measures out seconds. The gears are set to turn with each pulse to make it easier to see. First, I need to make sure that this crystal stays in sync with one I know works, at least for a minute. If it’s fine, do you mind if I use it? I have a small project that I’m pretty sure is a different type of clock.”

Shrugging, she said, “Sure, but if you mean to sell the finished product, I’d like some payment for finding it.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” he said. Any potential for sale could be figured out later. On making sure the new one worked, he shut up his pocketwatch. “Great, this should be the last thing that clock needs, then I can figure out what it does.”

Although he hadn’t mentioned it, Tabitha and Elmira followed him to a crate he was using as a work surface. “But if it’s a clock, it just tells time,” Tabitha said.

“Normally, but this one has extra mechanisms.” It was on the crate, so he set it on its feet to show them the odd cap-piece on it. There was a curly stand where two bronze demispheres hung. When he flicked it with his finger, one of them chimed. “It may just be that these small bells ring out the hour, but it looks more like you could set them to ring at a specific time.”

“What would be the use of doing that?” Tabitha asked.

“You could time things without your own magic,” Elmira said. “It’s harder to do when I’m not a Time Mage.”

“The time sense isn’t that hard to learn,” Tabitha said. “I can still accurately tell how much time has passed while doing things.”

“Well I haven’t kept that sense as that well,” Elmira said.

Mustadio already had the old clock opened up to set the time crystal in. While it was a task that required a magnifying lens (clamped onto the work crate) and a steady hand (with a needlenose tool to set it in place), he could take care of that while talking. “There’s smaller machines called stopwatches that can be used for that. My pocketwatch doesn’t have that function, but I’ve worked on others that do. But from some records in my father’s study, I believe this is called an alarm clock. A stopwatch measures short amounts of time; an alarm clock can be set hours ahead, often to wake people up.”

“Hey, that’d be useful for you,” Elmira said, teasing her friend with a jab of her elbow.

“I get up just fine,” Tabitha said with a frown.

“After I keep poking you for upwards of an hour; you really are a heavy sleeper.”

“Well you get up well before dawn every day,” she said. “I wake up in good time, just not that early.”

“It might give you more time in the morning,” Mustadio said, holding the crystal in place with the tool while getting a iron pen to secure it. The pen required a bit of magic to operate, just a simple spark that he’d learned early on to use ancient tool. “Careful, this can get hot and I need to concentrate…”

“It smells nasty,” Elmira said, wrinkling her nose.

“I don’t notice that anymore unless it goes wrong,” Mustadio said. The iron that the pen put in place had to connect to certain spots while also securing the crystal in place. Careful and slow, and don’t use too much; his father had made sure he understood that, since refilling the pen took some work converting the right kind of ores. Then he set the tools aside. “All right, it has to cool down before we can test it, but out here, it should set quickly.”

“What kind of tool is that?” Tabitha said, more interested than he thought she’d be. “I noticed you used some magic to activate it, but I thought machines did things without magic.”

Smiling at her interest, he said, “Some of them don’t, but many of the machines I’ve worked on do use some magic to operate. Like the airship engine we’ve been trying to get operational so we can attempt to rebuild one. It’s got a whole magic generator to take what should be a massively heavy vehicle and make it buoyant enough to move through the air.”

“You would need a lot of magic if that’s how you’re making an airship work,” Elmira said. “But it would be great if there were airships again. We wouldn’t be spending months trying to get from one end of Ivalice to the other through rough monster-infested areas. Wouldn’t need to risk a sea voyage either.”

“If you’ve got a project like an airship, what are you doing out here in the middle of the war?” Tabitha asked. “That sounds more interesting than risking your life out here, for a mechanic anyhow.”

Shaking his head, he said, “We’d love to be working on that, of course, but the discovery of the Zodiac Stones disrupted our work with the war. It’s going to take years to get a whole airship together and working, along with more people helping us out with building the ship parts. With all this fighting going on, we couldn’t get many workers, much time, or even safety to continue. Besides, I want to help Ramza change things. The government that any other faction might bring about could force us to turn the airship project into a warship. If Ivalice follows his lead, though, we should be able to just build an airship first.”

“That’s a good point,” she said, then looked over at Elmira. “We’ve been following Ramza a lot longer. No matter what he’s faced, he’s kept his ideals pure.”

Elmira nodded. “Yes, even as we’ve seen that the world beyond the academy isn’t following the honor we were taught. Ramza won’t betray his honor, and neither will we. We’re hoping for a time when we can actually study magic rather than trust what happens in battle.”

“That’s be great,” he said. “Actually, we do have some books about magic in Goug, from all the books we collected to research machines. When machines were more widespread, it was common to use them with magic, like with the airship engine and even these crystals for clocks. You could find some old resources among our books, since we set most of them aside as not useful to us but still something to preserve.”

“That would be handy, when there’s enough peace to study,” Tabitha said, then pointed out the pen. “But what is this tool?”

Making sure it was cool, Mustadio picked it up to hand to her. “We call it an iron pen, mostly because that’s the best sense we can make out of the old texts about tools. It attaches tiny parts like that crystal into small machines and connects them with the electrical or mystical lines that make such machines work. With big machines, sometimes they have small units like this called computers, which compute information somehow. The iron pen often gets used for adjusting those computer units.”

“But how do you get iron to compute anything?” Tabitha asked, looking the pen over. “Isn’t that doing math formulas? That Calculator class uses a lot of math that I’m still trying to work out, so how can metal do math?”

He shrugged. “I really don’t understand it myself. It’s one of the big mysteries in being an Engineer and figuring out the machines of Ajora’s day. We keep hoping with each book we check that it’ll be the one with the key to figuring out electronics. Until we can do that, things like airships and Worker 8 will be things we can only rebuild, not make ourselves.”

Elmira shrugged too. “Well we’ve got one of those guns that turns people to stone and I can’t explain that since machines shouldn’t be able to use a petrification curse. But it still does.”

“Actually, I’ve read about that Stone Gun before,” Mustadio said, thinking back over that passage. “That’s a lot easier to explain than the iron pen making this clock work accurately. According to the old records, the Stone Gun itself is cursed. An Engineer of the old machine era asked a demon to help him make the most powerful gun in existence, and to make many of them. The demon agreed by telling him to use a fang from a snake from a Gorgon’s head. And the Stone Gun is the most powerful gun we have records of, just it petrifies its user. If you undo the curse or manage to remove the fang, the gun’s power gets cut greatly. A friend of my father tried it once and got in trouble for making a scam of it.”

“If it’s cursed, we might not need worry about seeing it in an enemy’s hands again,” Tabitha said. “We’d just need to be ready to soften somebody if we need that kind of power.”

“If we need it,” Elmira said. “Because we have lots of powerful offense that doesn’t require being cursed.”

“True.”

On making sure the connection was cool and secure, Mustadio shut the alarm clock up. “I have wondered why being a user of black magic causes your head to get shrouded in black. Is that a curse?”

Tabitha sighed and picked up her hat. “That’s one of the things that I’d like to know! Our teacher in the military academy didn’t even know; she just said it was a proof of being devoted to black magic. The two of us spent a full year figuring out how to be an active Wizard without obscuring your face. While it’s good intimidation in battle, it’s not so good when you’re around town trying to get normal things done.”

Elmira nodded. “Besides, once you practice a spell enough, you can use it regardless of class. The head obscuring is only connected to being a Wizard.”

“Some old retired Wizard once told me it was a proud tradition that we should respect,” Tabitha said, setting her hat on. The magic tried to obscure her face, but she willed it not to.

Chuckling, Elmira said, “Wasn’t that the guy who harassed us with that angry lecture about the pride of magic users and completely lost his line of thought midway through?”

“It is silly to look back on,” she agreed.

“Did he ever explain why it’s tradition?" Mustadio asked, testing out the dials. The crystal made sure to keep the black clock hands on the proper time even if he messed with them. But one dial shifted the thin red hands below the black ones. He shifted it to the next minute ahead and watched the second hand turn.

“No,” Tabitha said. “No person or book we’ve found could tell us why it’s tradition. It just is; it just happens when you unlock the use of black magic. Who knows, it might just be God’s way of warning us to be careful with black magic. It is entirely curses and offensive spells, after all.”

“It does make it hard to tell one Wizard from another,” Elmira said, a playful smile on her face. “That has its uses.”

That did make Tabitha laugh. “You always were more of a troublemaker, even if you don’t use black magic as often as me.”

“Don’t others expect more trouble out of a black magic user?” Mustadio asked. “So if you’re going to make trouble, it’s more of a surprise out of a Priest.”

The women both laughed at that right before the alarm clock hit the minute mark. That caused it to throttle both of the bells into a screaming alarm. While the other two jumped in surprise at the volume, Mustadio grabbed the clock and tried to remember which switch should shut the alarm function off. People would use these to wake up, so he tried to obvious button on the side. That stopped the clanging and vibrating.

“I can’t believe that clock is so loud,” Tabitha said, rubbing her ears.

“But that would wake even you up,” Elmira teased her again.

“It would wake everyone here up,” she argued.

“I should be able to adjust the volume here,” Mustadio said, already fiddling with the dials. “It’s great that it works, but if I tried to use this, I’d wake up with a headache.”

Ramza then came over to them. “What was that racket over here?”

“This alarm clock I’ve been fixing up,” Mustadio explained. “Sorry, but that’s what it does.”

“People used to use it to wake up on time, it seems,” Elmira said, then poked her friend. “Tabitha should use it because the crystal she got made it work.”

“As long as it doesn’t betray our position,” Ramza said.

“Fine, I’ll give it a try if it’s not that loud,” Tabitha said.

The next day, Mustadio had to make new repairs to the alarm clock because Tabitha had shut it off by hitting it with Ice 2. But it did its job of getting her awake on time. More importantly, it gave him some new friends to talk with about magic and machines. Mustadio decided to work on the calculator machine next, in hopes that it might help them figure out that mysterious Calculator class. He had a good idea of what the machine did, but what would it let them do better?

Once they had peace, the women might even be interested in helping them solve the airship design problems.


End file.
